Kinetic Art, Chapter I: Movement of Rigid Bodies

"The least you can demand from a painting, is that it hangs still." Pablo Picasso

"Mondrian didn't like the idea."
Alexander
Calder

Rotation.

Marcel Duchamp: Bicycle Wheel (1913).

To add:

Demonstration of the motion detection
mechanism of the human eye, by means of a spinning black & white
disk (J.F. Schouten).

Tinguely/Klein collaboration: spinning
monochromes (high speeds).

Translation.

Ray Staakman: Moving steel wall. (Early
nineteensixties.)

Simultaneous Rotations.

Jean Tinguely: Méta-Malevich
Series (15 pieces), 1954

Front / Back

Snapshot / Multiple Exposure

Méta-Kandinsky I (Wundermaschine), 1956

"... 'meta-mechanical paintings', reliefs
of a kind, in which simple geometrical shapes painted in the primary colours
move about slowly in front of a surface. (. . .) It is theoretically possible
to calculate the periodicity of the reliefs. One of them, for instance,
ought to repeat the same configuration after about a year, if it ran continuously.
But the couplings slip a bit; as a result, the shapes might reach the
same position already after two months, or it might not happen for hundreds
of years."

Hultén, 1955, p. 26.

"I am an artist of movement. Initially I did painting but I got
blocked there, I found myself stuck. I was handicapped by the whole
history of art and the Ecole des Beaux Arts. I got hung up in the pictures,
on the pictures  finally all I could do is wait until they were
tired; I could never find their end. So I decided to introduce movement.
I started from Constructivist elements, taken from the vocabulary of
the Russian Suprematist painter Malevich, and from Kandinsky and Arp
and a few others. I re-used their elements and set them in motion. I
was trying to get away from the imperative, the power of these artists,
also from Mondrian. I began to use movement simply to make a re-creation.
It was a way of re-doing a painting so that it would become infinite
 it would go on making new compositions by means of the physical
and mechanical movements that I gave it."

Assignment (Algorithmic Art): Make computer simulations of
the Méta-Malevitch's and Méta-Kandinsky's, and integrate
them in a Méta-Tinguely-program. Make sure the program is based
on an explicit mathematical model. Describe and motivate the model
in an accompanying essay.

Compositions with Movement:
Alexander Calder's "Mobiles à Moteur".

Calder (...) says
that during a visit to Mondrian's studio, in the rue du Départ
in Paris, he received a vision of a new art form (...). Mondrian's studio
was an extraordinary room, with small, movable red, blue and yellow
rectangles on the white walls, and a large, red, cylindrical gramophone
in the middle of the floor (..). Calder writes: "... the light
coming from two facing windows met in the room, and I thought how beautiful
it would have been if everything had started to move, but Mondrian didn't
like the idea." (...)

Hultén 1955, p. 19. [Cf.
also: Calder, 1937.]

Calder did not heed Mondriaan's advice, and developed
a form of "kinetic constructivism" in his "Mobiles
à moteur" (1931): different elementary shapes: line,
spiral, circle, ball; different elementary colors and black/white/grey;
different elementary movements: rotation, pendulum, virtual translation;
rotation-axis in the picture-plane or orthogonal to it.

Calder describes one of these works as follows:

• Dimensions:
2 x 2.50 m.

• Frame,
8 cm., neutral red.

• The
two white balls rotate at a high speed.

• The
black spiral rotates at a lower speed and appears to be constantly
climbing.

• The
tin disc turns even more slowly, the two black lines appear to be
constantly climbing.

• The
black pendulum, which is 40 cm. in diameter, climbs to 45° on
each side with 25 strokes a minute and swings outside the frame

Mobile à Moteur
"Red Frame", 1931.

Mobile à Moteur
"Black Frame", 1934.

Man Ray:
Equation-Obstruction, 1920.

Alexander Calder:
Untitled, 1942.

Alexander Calder:
Myxomatose, 1953.

Natural Chance:Alexander Calder's "Mobiles à Main".

Calder's later "mobiles à main"
use organic-looking shapes, hung in balanced constructions which
can rotate freely. They are very light; the slightest breeze of air
creates (unpredictable) motions.

The "mobile à main" has the mechanical structure
of a planetarium: nested rotary relations. But its movements are different:
horizontal pendulums with unpredictable speeds and amplitudes, rather
than uniform rotations. We are in Arp's world rather than Mondriaan's.

An almost readymade version of this idea had been carried out Man
Ray a decade before: a construction of cloth-hangers.
(Cf. Duchamp: bottle-rack, coat-racks. Cf. Armand: accumulations.)

Calder found
that a motor forced repetition on the movement: if the mechanism
was not rather complicated there was a danger of the movement becoming
monotonous. (...) With his 'mobiles à main' Calder found
the simple, perfect way of giving his constructions mobility, by
the use of equilibrium, as fundamental a principle as Duchamp's
rotary movement. These wires, suspended interdependently and moving
their frail elements in space, offer an inexhaustible range of possibilities.
(...) Calder took the history of mobile art a step forward by the
introduction of endless variation, the fact that the movement of
a mobile never repeats itself exactly. It is now possible to create
endlessly complicated combinations, eternal change. As I see it,
everlastingly varied rhythm is one of the assets of mobile sculpture,
without which it is in danger of becoming more boring than static
sculpture.

Hultén
1955, pp. 21-22.

Hultén thus distinguishes:

the number of configurations that
may occur
(finite or infinite);

the sequence of configurations
(fixed or not);

the nature of the movement
(uniform or varied).

A combination of different of different periodic
movements yields an infinite, non-cyclic sequence of configurations,
iff the periods of some of the movements are incommensurable; but
its a deterministic well-ordered process, and it is experienced as
such. In Calder's "mobiles à main", the sequence
is non-deterministic, because the motions are caused by unpredictable
external influences.

Mechanical Chance

Jean Tinguely's earliest kinetic works, discussed
above, are based on painterly examples. (Méta-Malevitch, Méta-Kandinsky,
Méta-Herbin). The elements of these "kinetic paintings" are simultaneously rotated with different speeds; this creates an
infinite variety of possible configurations.

Tinguely's next step is the construction of machines which are no
longer concerned with painting, but with movement per se. These "moving sculptures" consist of motors, wheels, belts, cogs,
and crank-shafts. Their movements are irregular because of the machine's
imperfections. This irregularity has nothing in common with the unpredictability
of Calder's mobiles à main: it is not organic but anti-mechanic:
jerking, jamming, jittering epicycles of periodic rotations and translations.
[slippen, haperen, stokken] (Rubato:
Gustav Leonhart, Thelonious Monk.)

"Tinguely
discovered an almost inexhaustible source  a mechanism whose
goal was not precision but anti-precision, the mechanics of chance."
[Pontus
Hultén 1975, p. 8.]

"In
machines intended for practical use the engineer tries to reduce
the irregularities as much as possible. Tinguely is after the exact
opposite. His objective is mechanical disorder. His cog-wheels are
so constructed that they jump the cogs continually, jam, and start
turning again, unpredictably. (. . .) The same movement can appear
ten times in succession and then, apparently, never be repeated
again. This creates an unusually acute sense of time."
[Hultén 1955, p. 26.]

"Tinguely
(...) uses an old-fashioned technology in his machines. He likes
ordinary, conventional motors (...). As yet, with the exception
of the components from radio-sets used in his sculptures around
1962, he has never employed electronics or other more up-to-date
techniques." [ Pontus
Hultén 1975, p. 307.]

"There
was nothing new in the idea of deliberately introducing chance as
an element in art. (. . .) In Tinguely's case, however, it was no
longer a matter of the role of chance in the act of creation, nor
of a static display of something that had come about by chance,
but of chance in action." [Pontus
Hultén 1975, p. 8.]

"With their
unrepeatable and unique movements and sequences, Tinguely's machines
exist in an enviable freedom. Their vitality, spontaneity, and lyricism
bring to us ecstatic moments of life divorced entirely from moral
precept or inhibition, from good and evil, right and wrong, beautiful
or ugly. His machines are a piece of pure existence, eternally changeable,
and they do not have to mean anything or refer to anything. But
one is mistaken to believe that their artistic message is innocent
or harmless. They subvert the established order and convey a sense
of anarchy and individual liberation which would otherwise not exist."
[Hultèn 1965, pp. 13/14.]

"Métamatic
and Métaméchanique  In the work of Jean Tinguely
(Swiss, 1925  ), machines programmed electronically to act with
antimechanical unpredictability, jerking erraticly, sometimes scribbling
on rolls of paper. Tinguely was influenced by Klee, Miró and Duchamp.
His most famous work was Homage to New York, 1960, an assemblage including
an old piano, a pram, a meteorological balloon, and various machine parts;
it self-destructed with pyrotechnics before a crowd; its remnants now
at the Museum of Modern Art, NY. See automata, Dada and Surrealism."

[From: Artlex.com]

Exam question:
This text from Artlex.comcontains
one very bad mistake. Discuss it.

Pamphlet released in 150.000 copies
from an airplane above Düsseldorf, March 14, 1959. A more extensive
manifesto along the same lines was presented in Tinguely's lecture
"Art, Machines and Motion" at the Cyclo-matic Evening, ICA,
London, November 12, 1959.

[Cf. Pontus Hultén, 1975,
pp. 77, 114-119, 327; Hulten 1987, p.67.]

For Stasis

Everything moves. Rest does not exist. Don't let
yourself be controlled by obsolete notions of time. Away with
hours, seconds and minutes. Stop resisting change. EXIST IN TIME
- BE STATIC, BE STATIC WITH THE MOVEMENT. For stasis, in the now
occurring NOW. Resist the anxious impulse to stop what moves,
to freeze moments and to kill what lives. Give up constructing
«values» that always collapse anyway. Be free, live!
Stop «painting» time. Give up building cathedrals
and pyramids, that fall apart like sugar-candy. Breathe deep,
live in the now, live on and in time. For a beautiful and absolute
reality!

Düsseldorf, March
1959 TINGUELY

Essay topic:
Analyse Tinguely's pamphlet. For instance: investigate connections
with Bergson's psychology of time; with Wittgenstein's statement that "living in eternity is living in the present" (Tractatus);
with Duchamp's "aesthetics of indifference" (cf. Pyrrho
and other Stoics); and with Tinguely's art.

Footnotes about Tinguely:

Automatic painting.

In 1959, Tinguely's Metamatics become
autonomous painters themselves. We devote a separate
page to this pioneering work in automatic image generation.

Uselessness.

Tinguely's machines were often interpreted
as demonstrating "uselessness", but they didn't seem to
mind. Around 1964, their behaviour tends to get less cheerful and
more predictable. Mechanical, regular motions. Sisyphus-labor, joyless
sex. Cf: Pontus Hultén 1975, p. 278.